I’ve noticed this water narrative coming up in many other unrelated stories. When the protests against the Keystone XL pipeline were at their height, it was actually water that was the focal issue rather than oil itself. (The slogan of the Standing Rock protests was “water is life”.)
At around that time, I had noticed that Nestle was becoming one of the most hated companies on Reddit, because of various facilities to bottle water. People got extremely upset at one facility in Michigan, where there is nothing like a water shortage, because it somehow seemed insensitive to bottle water in Michigan at a time when the Flint water infrastructure was leaking lead. People didn’t quite understand that the issue was lead - they somehow thought Flint had a water shortage, and assumed Nestle was somehow making it worse.
This issue has driven me nuts since it first went through. The bigger mistake is that they mistook 'flow' for 'consumption.' Most water flows through a cooling system at a rate, say 100 gallons a minute. Therefore, if you asked ChatGPT 1,000 question a minute they said each question 'consumed' 1/10th of a gallon. But it's not like drinking water and pissing it out, it flows back to the holding system, cools, and cycles back. The evaporation is something they want to avoid because water isn't cheap. The biggest mistake they made was equating flow with consumption.
As my old grad school mentor used to say to me: "You cannot reason your way out of something you were not reasoned *into*"
But I wonder, do you think critics "already feel" negatively towards AI and just cannot accurately pinpoint where the feeling is coming from and therefore latch on to the easy-to-adopt water argument? Meaning, do you think the water issue is making some people anti-AI or is it that anti-AI people are using water as the issue that everyone can agree on as a case against it?
Good question. I think it's mostly the latter: water is a safe bet for anti-AI people! But there's a bit of the former (people who don't know much about AI will become wary of it when they hear about the water thing).
Thanks for this. 2026 promises to be another year of great posts. Your psychological autopsy is so wide-ranging that I’m inclined to sketch a massive mind map just to keep thinking along these many lines of inquiry . . .
Really enjoyed this as the proliferation of this argument has been driving me absolutely nuts since I read Masley's article and it's so interesting to get under the hood of why it has been such a sticky one in spite of plenty of counter evidence.
I guess the correct (pragmatic) answer is to join the communities where this already happens (e.g. rationalists), but I don't think it's possible to impose that change into the broader population
I get the concern's over resource use, but to me that concern is better directed at turning the world into a server centre, or worse, going into space to pollute that too.
I even find a better criticism that a lot of investment that is directed to data centers could be directed to other things than water. Water is the easiest to make and possibly the worst/least correct.
Thank you for this. As is often the case, discovering new ways of thinking about things/seeing the problem, is more enlightening that discovering new facts
Concrete ask of those who want to advance arguments against AI based on resource consumption: drop water, map your concerns to energy.
I get that it isn't as pure a symbol, but the contention and possible carbon impacts of AI energy use aren't so dismissible that those who want to ally with you in pushing back against the AI race feel obliged to disclaim and distance themselves from you.
Great post. Intuitively, the ‘AI and data centres use too much water and electricity’ concern is unfounded because presumably it is economically feasible to buy the water and electricity to run the data centres, and if it wasn’t then the price of using AI would be prohibitively expensive and therefore the technology would not be commercially available
Yes, but with "too much" they don't mean literally "possible" but "desirable". It turns out that water usage is not that high as to be undesirable in most cases (there might be exceptions where careful handling of supply is critical), except for those people who deem AI inherently undesirable.
Yep. Water and electricity infrastructure responds to supply and demand. If there are customers willing to pay, the utility providers will build more capacity. In Australia water is very precious, but that is mostly due to the way the state governments along the Murray Darling basin agree to distribute the available water as it moves downstream, making it very scarce for settlements at the mouth of the river. The amount of water available for agriculture is obscene for the tiny price many of the farmers pay. It would dwarf the amount of water used by data centres. Urban utility customers pay exorbitant prices per ML, while farmers pay practically nothing, due to historical arrangements and political lobbying
It is far from my biggest issue re racing to superintelligence (that would be the "kills everyone" concern) but especially in the US the energy resource concern has some merit and nuance, while the water resource concern is embarrassing.
(The industry is structured such that existing consumers do share the cost of investing in enormous new supply, and it does increase demand for carbon based energy sources.)
Thought-provoking take! This explains *why* the water narrative sticks far better than another data-center chart ever could. Nuance vs symbols is the real battle here
Bubble, perhaps, but I've seen dozens of debunkings of the LLM water use issue months before I've seen anyone actually use it as a straight criticism. And in the rare cases I see it used straight, it's never more than a brief throwaway remark.
I think the explanation may be much simpler and people are essentially trolling. As in, they see how the issue riles the pro-AI people up and reasonably conclude it's a good way to piss those people off.
When bothered about using ChatGPT I like to ask the critic if they eat meat (inevitably true) and then smugly denounce them for the water use from that
Narrative economics at play with water consumption and flow rates. I think it’s more of an emotional deflection: something people latch onto to avoid confronting AI’s impending impact on the economy. That’s been my experience with it.
I’ve noticed this water narrative coming up in many other unrelated stories. When the protests against the Keystone XL pipeline were at their height, it was actually water that was the focal issue rather than oil itself. (The slogan of the Standing Rock protests was “water is life”.)
At around that time, I had noticed that Nestle was becoming one of the most hated companies on Reddit, because of various facilities to bottle water. People got extremely upset at one facility in Michigan, where there is nothing like a water shortage, because it somehow seemed insensitive to bottle water in Michigan at a time when the Flint water infrastructure was leaking lead. People didn’t quite understand that the issue was lead - they somehow thought Flint had a water shortage, and assumed Nestle was somehow making it worse.
This issue has driven me nuts since it first went through. The bigger mistake is that they mistook 'flow' for 'consumption.' Most water flows through a cooling system at a rate, say 100 gallons a minute. Therefore, if you asked ChatGPT 1,000 question a minute they said each question 'consumed' 1/10th of a gallon. But it's not like drinking water and pissing it out, it flows back to the holding system, cools, and cycles back. The evaporation is something they want to avoid because water isn't cheap. The biggest mistake they made was equating flow with consumption.
Yeah, I think this is a big part of it. Would this conceptual shift work? I'm not sure, but it seems like it's simple enough that it could work
Great insight I will remember: flow is not consumption.
As my old grad school mentor used to say to me: "You cannot reason your way out of something you were not reasoned *into*"
But I wonder, do you think critics "already feel" negatively towards AI and just cannot accurately pinpoint where the feeling is coming from and therefore latch on to the easy-to-adopt water argument? Meaning, do you think the water issue is making some people anti-AI or is it that anti-AI people are using water as the issue that everyone can agree on as a case against it?
Good question. I think it's mostly the latter: water is a safe bet for anti-AI people! But there's a bit of the former (people who don't know much about AI will become wary of it when they hear about the water thing).
Very lenghty but an excellent read.
🙏🙏🙏
Thanks for this. 2026 promises to be another year of great posts. Your psychological autopsy is so wide-ranging that I’m inclined to sketch a massive mind map just to keep thinking along these many lines of inquiry . . .
Thank you Mary, and happy new year (much more to come!)
Really enjoyed this as the proliferation of this argument has been driving me absolutely nuts since I read Masley's article and it's so interesting to get under the hood of why it has been such a sticky one in spite of plenty of counter evidence.
If the problem is ultimately people seeking in-group status rather than the truth, then we need to make truth-seeking high-status.
Any ideas on how to do this?
I guess the correct (pragmatic) answer is to join the communities where this already happens (e.g. rationalists), but I don't think it's possible to impose that change into the broader population
I get the concern's over resource use, but to me that concern is better directed at turning the world into a server centre, or worse, going into space to pollute that too.
I even find a better criticism that a lot of investment that is directed to data centers could be directed to other things than water. Water is the easiest to make and possibly the worst/least correct.
Thank you for this. As is often the case, discovering new ways of thinking about things/seeing the problem, is more enlightening that discovering new facts
Thanks for reading Nick
Concrete ask of those who want to advance arguments against AI based on resource consumption: drop water, map your concerns to energy.
I get that it isn't as pure a symbol, but the contention and possible carbon impacts of AI energy use aren't so dismissible that those who want to ally with you in pushing back against the AI race feel obliged to disclaim and distance themselves from you.
Excellent post as always...
Thank you Kenneth!
We don’t always agree and that is ok i still love your work and your passion. You have always done good work but i will keep poking you lol.
It's good to be poked, keeps me sharp!
Great post. Intuitively, the ‘AI and data centres use too much water and electricity’ concern is unfounded because presumably it is economically feasible to buy the water and electricity to run the data centres, and if it wasn’t then the price of using AI would be prohibitively expensive and therefore the technology would not be commercially available
Yes, but with "too much" they don't mean literally "possible" but "desirable". It turns out that water usage is not that high as to be undesirable in most cases (there might be exceptions where careful handling of supply is critical), except for those people who deem AI inherently undesirable.
Yep. Water and electricity infrastructure responds to supply and demand. If there are customers willing to pay, the utility providers will build more capacity. In Australia water is very precious, but that is mostly due to the way the state governments along the Murray Darling basin agree to distribute the available water as it moves downstream, making it very scarce for settlements at the mouth of the river. The amount of water available for agriculture is obscene for the tiny price many of the farmers pay. It would dwarf the amount of water used by data centres. Urban utility customers pay exorbitant prices per ML, while farmers pay practically nothing, due to historical arrangements and political lobbying
It is far from my biggest issue re racing to superintelligence (that would be the "kills everyone" concern) but especially in the US the energy resource concern has some merit and nuance, while the water resource concern is embarrassing.
(The industry is structured such that existing consumers do share the cost of investing in enormous new supply, and it does increase demand for carbon based energy sources.)
Thought-provoking take! This explains *why* the water narrative sticks far better than another data-center chart ever could. Nuance vs symbols is the real battle here
Right, all that data and the story remains the same (although I think it does fundamental work still; without the data I could not write this!)
Bubble, perhaps, but I've seen dozens of debunkings of the LLM water use issue months before I've seen anyone actually use it as a straight criticism. And in the rare cases I see it used straight, it's never more than a brief throwaway remark.
I think the explanation may be much simpler and people are essentially trolling. As in, they see how the issue riles the pro-AI people up and reasonably conclude it's a good way to piss those people off.
If bubble, then it's a good bubble to be in!
In our age the truth doesn't matter as much as narrative does.
When bothered about using ChatGPT I like to ask the critic if they eat meat (inevitably true) and then smugly denounce them for the water use from that
Narrative economics at play with water consumption and flow rates. I think it’s more of an emotional deflection: something people latch onto to avoid confronting AI’s impending impact on the economy. That’s been my experience with it.